One-step cathodic electrosynthesis of surface capped Fe3O4 ultra-fine nanoparticles from ethanol medium without using coating agent

In this letter, a simple and efficient cathodic electrosynthesis (CE) platform is reported for preparation of magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs). In this procedure, surface capped MNPs (with size of similar to 10 nm) were prepared from the Fe(III) nitrate/ethanol bath through CE process without using any coating agent. The prepared MNPs were characterized by different techniques of XRD, FE-SEM, TEM, FT-IR, TGA, DLS and VSM. It was found that solvent act as capping agent during the CE process, where surface of the deposited MNPs are capped with ethoxy groups i.e. -C2H5O. The VSM data proved superparamagnetic behavior of the prepared MNPs (i.e. M-s = 44.84 emu g (1), Mr = 0.21 emu g (1) and Ce = 1.38 Oe). The obtained results implied that the developed CE strategy is an effective one-pot method for preparation of surface capped MNPs. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.